


Cinder Ella

by Haberdasher



Category: Elsewhere University (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 09:14:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12105495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: One student learns more than expected after enrolling at Elsewhere University.





	Cinder Ella

Ella was a model high school student. She aced every test that was given to her; she was a first chair flute player in her school’s orchestra; her writing won awards both local and national. She could have had her pick of the Ivy Leagues, could have had any number of top-tier schools fighting to secure her attendance, could have gone to any school she chose.

Ella chose Elsewhere University.

When people asked why, she gave a number of answers. One day she’d say it was the scholarships, that cost alone had guided her to Elsewhere. Another day she would say that she wanted to do something different, wanted to defy the expectations that so many had for her. On yet another day it’d be that she wanted to continue to be the star student wherever she went, wanted to continue reaping the benefits of being a big fish in a small pond.

None of these answers were lies, exactly, but none of them told the whole truth either.

The truth of the matter was, Ella knew as soon as she set foot on Elsewhere’s campus that it was the school for her. It felt right in a way she couldn’t quite put into words. It felt like home, more so than any other school she’d visited had felt, more so even than her mother’s cramped apartment in the city. From the moment she first entered, she never wanted to leave.

Some of the college search books Ella had read through had mentioned such a feeling and said to trust one’s instincts when choosing a college. And so that was that.

Upon enrolling, Ella, ever fond of wordplay, chose the name Cinder for herself.

(She might have chosen differently had she known that Elsewhere’s campus was home to any number of “fairy tales” come to life in the worst way.)

While unpacking, Ella put on the washer on a string that had been given to all the incoming freshmen and tucked it under her shirt- one of the student websites she’d browsed said that only freshmen wore washers openly, and that one should avoid being marked as a freshman if at all possible. She forgot about it for an hour or two, too busy finding room for all the things she had carted with and getting to know her roommate (a sophomore who went by Motormouth and definitely lived up to the name), but the spot where the washer hung grew itchy over time, and a quick trip to the bathroom showed that the area had turned a bright red.

Ella removed the washer, and the itching abated, though her skin remained red until it started to peel several days later. A quick googling of “iron allergy” turned up no helpful information. Ella shrugged and assumed that the washer must have been coated in some strange chemical that made her break out, and dumped both the washer and the string on which it was held post-haste.

(If Motormouth noticed that her roommate never wore any iron, she never said a word- and Motormouth of all people would have spoken up.)

Motormouth insisted on leaving a line of white powder in the doorway. Ella insisted on kicking it with her shoe every time she left the room. Each time the powder was replaced, Ella would disturb it once more, ignoring Motormouth’s half-fledged arguments. She made sure none of the powder made it outside the confines of their shared dorm room, however; she could imagine all too clearly the consequences of having an RA stumble upon a mysterious white powder scattered outside their door. It was part of some weird campus superstition, to hear Motormouth tell it, for “protection” against forces which Motormouth struggled to name, but something about it- whether it was the powder itself, or the idea of following such silly superstitions- always made Ella a little queasy. On the few occasions where she let it stay in place as she passed through the doorway, the queasy feeling would linger for some minutes, and Ella would make sure to kick the powder with gusto the next time around.

The first day of classes, one of the professors (Ella wondered later, once she learned what hid behind so many innocuous-seeming campus “traditions”, if the professor in question knew too little or two much) started the class by having each student tell two truths and a lie about themselves, and having the class guess which statement was the lie.

Ella didn’t have much trouble coming up with her three statements.

(”I was born in a town so small it gets left off of maps more often than not”: True, though she remembered those days hazily, with only a few blurred memories of the countryside remaining. More than the countryside itself, she remembered the shock of moving to the city, going from being acquainted with everyone in town to not knowing a soul and bumping into a dozen strangers daily, from living a calm and slow-paced life to living where time was money and everyone was always in a rush.

“I own a pet chinchilla back at home”: False; her mother’s rental agreement didn’t allow them to keep any animals. The closest thing she had to pets were the pigeons that roamed her block- when she was young, she would try to identify them all and give each one a name, but when she struggled both to find names she hadn’t used yet and to be sure that this pigeon wasn’t one she’d seen before, she gave up the task and moved on to other pursuits.

“I never had any wisdom teeth”: True, to the shock and envy of many. Sometimes she would joke that she was wise enough that she didn’t need extra wisdom granted via tooth; sometimes her mother would joke back that her lack of wisdom teeth was the reason Ella sometimes failed to understand things her mother considered common sense.)

But when she tried to say the second, false statement, she got as far as “I own a-” before tripping over her words, struggling to eke out a single syllable, finally squeaking out “-pet chinchilla” and stopping there as her throat grew hoarse.

Her voice returned as she spoke the final, true statement, but the class didn’t have much trouble guessing what the lie was- it was the statement she’d barely been able to speak, the one during which her attempts at composure were more or less in vain.

Ella googled "sore throat” and “difficulty speaking” and “laryngitis” and a number of other terms and half-convinced herself that she had contracted some serious, possibly life-threatening illness before remembering that she’d only had trouble speaking once, the one time that she’d tried telling a lie on campus. (She had nothing against telling lies when they served her purpose; the occasion just hadn’t come up otherwise.)

Ella spent a few minutes after that in the hall bathroom starting statements with “My name is-” and trying to finish the sentence with whatever names came to mind, be they names of old classmates or of fictional characters, noticing how her throat ached and her voice grew weak as she tried to give any name that wasn’t her own, trying to study what exactly was going wrong as she attempted to speak.

(She got a few odd looks from people who were using the bathroom for more ordinary purposes, but she didn’t much care what they thought.)

As the semester went by, as Ella heard in bits and pieces from other students about the meaning behind what official school literature called “tradition”, all the disparate signs came together in her mind, and something deep inside her clicked.

Ella went to the Gentry on her own accord, offering a deal of her own devising.

She wasn’t asking what she was; she knew now, knew that the picture-perfect life she’d lived before was a lie, knew that she had been left behind in a spot where the boundary between worlds wore thin, knew that by luck or fate or mere coincidence she had found her way to another such spot.

Ella’s deal was this: she gives a Name, one that both is and is not her own, and in return she gets to meet the original owner of that name, and has the ability to come visit that other “Ella” at any time of her choosing.

It wasn’t an even deal, and Ella knew it, knew it even as the words to make it were leaving her mouth. But just how bad a deal it really was wasn’t impressed into her until it was too late.

Some students at Elsewhere referred to the non-human residents of the university simply as Them, but the fact of the matter was that there was no Them, just a great number of beings with their own allegiances and agendas.

Some humans called them the Fair Folk, but they are not fair when they can avoid it, not to humans, and not to anyone whom they think they can get the better of.

Ella bet everything she had on the assumption that giving her Name to the first being that would make a deal with her would be a show of trust more than anything else, proof that she was willing to work with another of her own kind, a power that would go unused as long as she was cautious and broke no rules.

But the Gentry don’t deal in trust. They deal in results.

And so, Ella’s bet quickly proved to be a grave miscalculation.


End file.
